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Does Your Ecommerce Store Need Live Chat

Businesses that require direct communication between seller and customer, and businesses selling custom products/wholesale offers can benefit greatly from having live chat on their website. Businesses with a high bounce rate and low conversion rate can use live chat to identify problem areas as well as improve their overall site performance.

Businesses with high AOV (generally above $1k) can gain an advantage from live chat because the time to purchase is higher and live chat can help build trust between customers and sellers, similar to that of an in-store shopping experience. For example, ECP had a client with an AOV of about $1,600. Before installing live chat, their conversion rate was 0.51%. Two weeks after, their conversion grew to 0.90%, without any significant changes in traffic, marketing strategy, pricing, or outside influences.

Live chat gives customers someone that can immediately walk them through an order if they become confused or have a question that could potentially make or break a sale. The result – eliminated bounces from your website and an increased amount of filled shopping carts that make it the entire way through check out.

Generally speaking, live chat cannot harm an ecommerce store, or any online business. The least it can do is offer some insight into what customers think about your website. The ultimate question boils down to the resources necessary for operating it. Most live chat options are inexpensive, but the service might get costly if you have a lot of website traffic and need a lot of employees to operate the software.

Live Chat Strategy for Ecommerce Stores

From our findings, live chat is best utilized as an added value to a customer’s shopping experience. An example of this is offering promotions through the software – giving 10% off to customers through live chat. This tactic shows that there is help available if neces

sary, while simultaneously increasing the chances of them making a purchase. When reaching out to new clients via live chat, it is important to establish credibility. Many people believe live chats are automated and no one wants to waste their time speaking with a robot. Companies should try to understand common scenarios of users in live chat and analyze transcripts to optimize the live chat conversations.

Live chat provides a company with access to customers’ pain points – as live chat representatives talk to buyers, they can find out ways to improve their products or services. For example, if you are selling shoes and you notice a lot of customers use the live chat to ask how to find red women’s shoes; this could be a possible indicator that the website’s navigation is not intuitive, the site search is not working properly, or that the filters do not include color or gender options. Live chat can also help you brainstorm ideas for products in demand, which you do not currently have. One of ECP’s customers made blue and red variants of a dress that was previously offered in only black, because visitors constantly asked for these colors via the live chat.

What Live Chat Should You Use?

The live chat used by ECP is called Zopim, which has served perfectly for our sales team. It is operated by two members of the sales team and under their control; they are able to directly interact with customers that need an explanation of our services. As common with most live chat software, customers are given an option to use a Contact Us form when the working day is over. We favor the form on Zopim because the design is extremely customizable and we are able to tag customers with labels based on their interests.

There are many live chat options available and most offer fairly similar functionality. Bold Chat focuses on solutions for Ecommerce websites, serving 24 of the Internet Retailer Top 500. Live Chat Monitoring offers Customer Service, 24/7 Lead Capture, Monthly Reporting, Customized Scripting, and Proactive Invitation. Similar to this is Livezilla, software that is loaded with features including Richtext Chats, Global Canned Messages, File Transfers, Email Transcripts, and more. Kayako allows visitors to continue their conversations in real-time and lets users see their customer’s information, events and history to give the best support possible.

About Us

About Ecommerce Partners:
Founded in 1998, ECommerce Partners is a full-service, ecommerce and interactive agency headquartered in New York City. Best known for our unique process methodology, we combine Internet expertise, creative talent, and business know-how to help clients across a variety of industries achieve rapid, measurable online marketing results.

True to our motto, "We build businesses, not just websites," we provide large and mid-sized companies with a full range of Internet marketing, website design and ecommerce solutions geared to maximize online revenues.